Best known on this side of the Atlantic for their one time Top Gear theme tune, ‘Jessica’ and the radio staples ‘Ramblin’ Man’ and ‘Whipping Post’ the Allmans were the first outfit to feature dual lead guitars and two drummers, becoming the hottest live act in the USA on the foot of their classic live At Fillmore East album. Gregg Allman became the leader of the band following the deaths of his brother, guitarist Duane and bandmate Berry Oakley, both killed in motorcycle accidents within 13 months of each other – and on the same stretch of road in Macon, Georgia. His solo career began in 1973 with the seminal Laid Back, featuring key tracks such as the single, ‘Midnight Rider’ and his version of Jackson Browne’s’ These Days’.
He continues to record and tour with the current incarnation of the Allman Brothers Band. Meanwhile his latest solo album, Low Country Blues, produced by the ubiquitous T-Bone Burnett, hit number five on the Billboard Charts on its release earlier this year to become his most successful solo album to date. He arrives in Europe with his band next month for a tour including a first ever visit to Ireland.
Allman hadn’t made a solo record for 14 years until Low Country Blues, partly due to the death of his long-time producer, the legendary Tom Dowd. It was his manager who suggested he work with T- Bone Burnett, then fresh from his success with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on the Raising Sand album.
“To be honest I’d never heard of him before,” Allman says of Burnett. “Maybe I lead a sheltered life (laughs). I was on tour with the Allman Brothers and the tour ended up in Detroit or Minneapolis or somewhere and my manager said, ‘Listen man, there’s someone I want you to meet down in Memphis.’ So we got there and we went to the Peabody Hotel and this cat came down – man, T-Bone is 7ft tall if he’s an inch. We started talking and it was when he said Tommy Dowd was one of his heroes as a producer, that’s when we really clicked. We discussed different techniques of recording and other stuff and towards the end of the conversation he said that he wanted to make an album with me.”
Burnett handed Allman a hard-drive containing thousands of old blues songs and asked him to pick out an album’s worth.
“Some of them were public domain songs, taken from scratchy old 78s and they were hard to understand. However, I was familiar with a lot of them,” Allman recalls. “Burnett told me to peel off a couple of dozen and to turn them into my own songs. He also said, ‘If you have to do a little re-writing that’s okay with me too’. So I took ‘em home, got ‘em ready and called him back and said, ‘We’re ready to make a record’. But then he said, ‘Oh by the way, you don’t need your own band, I’ve got the musicians all lined up and ready to go. I wasn’t happy with that and it almost thrashed the whole project right there. Then he said he had Dr. John, who had played on my second solo album, as one of the musicians and I was happier. I figured then that it would be an insult to turn down musicians he had hand-picked.”
The sessions were completed extremely quickly according to Allman and within a couple of weeks the record was done and dusted.
“T-Bone is a pretty matter-of-fact sorta guy in the studio and he always shoots straight from the hip. The other musicians were real easy to work with and we used analogue tape all the way, which gives it a nice warm sound. As a matter of fact, we started to run out of tape during the recording and had to run around town to look for more!”
The final tracklisting includes songs previously recorded by BB King (‘Please Accept My Love’), Bobby Bland (‘Blind Man’), Muddy Waters, (‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’) and Junior Wells (‘Little By Little’) among others, along with an Allman original, ‘Just
Another Rider’.
“We’re just flabbergasted how it’s turned out and how well it’s done in the charts,” Allman beams. “We’d didn’t know what to expect would come out of it, we just thought we were in the studio cutting a few tunes.”
On the road Allman plays keyboards and guitar and his gear includes a Johnny Cash Martin, a J-200 Gibson, (“those big fat ones, the biggest one they make), a black and a white Fender Stratocaster and his Hammond organ.
When he appears at Vicar St. he will be performing tracks from the new album as well as solo and ABB favourites as he explains: “My band is shit-hot and we do many of the great songs that I did with the Brothers over the years and solo stuff like, ‘Midnight Rider’ and Jackson Browne’s ’These Days. In fact he and I were real good friends back then – I learned a whole lot about songwriting from Jackson Browne. I’m really looking forward to coming to Dublin. I think we’ve a few days off there so, who knows, I might get the chance to do some motorcycle riding in the mountains!”

Low Country Blues is out now. Gregg Allman plays Vicar St. on July 4.